This Podcast Will Kill You - Special Episode: Mary Roach & Fuzz

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Where can you find banana-stealing macaques, dumpster-diving bears, flower-destroying gulls, and dangerously-exploding trees all in the same place? In a book by Mary Roach, of course. In this TPWKY book club episode, we’re joined by world’s funniest science writer and award-winning author to chat about her latest book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, a rollicking tour of the many ways that humans and wildlife clash and the varied attempts to mitigate this conflict. Our conversation carries us across the globe as we discuss why “man-eating cat” is a misnomer and how the Vatican takes pest control very seriously, and through time as we contemplate the changing nature of conservation and the hopeful future of human-wildlife conflict. If you’ve ever wondered about the forensics of wildlife attacks (in other words, what’s going on in the Ponderosa Room?) or whether scarecrows work like they’re supposed to (spoilers, they don’t), then this is the episode for you. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Santana won this tour 2026, the power, the energy. Come celebrate your favorite hits from Woodstock to supernatural and beyond with very special guest, the Doobie Brothers. Get tickets now at LiveNation.com. Santana and Doobie Brothers won this tour 2026. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh, and this is This Podcast Will Kill You. Welcome, everyone, to the latest installment of the TPWKY Book Club, my absolute favorite club, where we get to read fascinating popular science books and then chat with the authors of those books.

We've gotten to talk about why we saw co-consult. COVID coming, yet we're not able to stop it, whether sweat could be used as evidence in a criminal investigation, what the public image makeover of Neanderthals has to do with race science, and how uterus pancakes can help us communicate more clearly about menstruation. It's been so much fun so far, and I hope you all are enjoying these as much as I am. And it just keeps getting better, because this episode I'll be chatting with one of the best and, inarguably the funniest, science writers out there, the one and only Mary Roach. Whether she's covering what happens to cadavers after they get donated to science in her book Stiff,

the science of sex in Bonk, how space travel affects all aspects of human life in packing for Mars, or any of the other topics covered in her other best-selling and award-winning books, Roach strikes that delicate balance between engaging, and educational, all while being human and gut-bustingly hilarious. Seriously, if you haven't read any of her books before, you should go get them all. You'll thank me later. In today's episode, though, Roach joins me to chat not about cadavers or the Alimentary Canal, but about her latest book, Fuzz, when Nature breaks the Law, published in 2021. Human Wildlife Conflict can come in all shapes and sizes, from charismatic men,

megafauna doing uncharismatic things like elephants destroying property or weopards attacking people to less flashy incidents like goals destroying flowers quote unquote danger trees exploding well dangerously or that deer in your headlights you may have even been involved in human wildlife conflict at some point yourself i for one have been attacked by dive bombing birds while on a run, with forehead scratches to prove it. I've had to dash back to the truck when a herd of elephants made a sudden appearance during tick sampling, and I've been rushed by Canada geese on a walk around the park. To this day, the sight of a goose on the path in front of me sends my heart racing. And those are just the vertebrate examples I can think of. Don't get me started on wasps and

acacia ants and cockroaches. The way we often frame these adverse encounters with wildlife is, is by placing ourselves, humans, in the role of victim and the animal in the role of aggressor. I just did it in the examples I gave, and I did it without even thinking. But is that really the case? Was I attacked by a dive-bombing bird, or did I get unknowingly too close to the bird's nest, prompting it to defend itself? Do bears break into dumpsters and wreak havoc, or did humans destroy what used to be bear habitat,

and place dumpsters there as an unintentionally reliable food source. The bottom line is that these animals are breaking laws that they don't know exist. And since we humans created those laws, we also have the responsibility to find a way to enforce them or adjust them in ways that minimize harm to both humans and wildlife as much as possible. Part of this involves changing the narrative around human wildlife conflict, maybe reconsidering the roles of wildlife as perpetrator and human as victim, or at the very least, acknowledging the part that we play in creating this conflict. And part of it is from a

practical standpoint, how to limit the conflict in the first place, which includes encouraging humans to change a notoriously difficult task, and how to humanely diffuse a situation. In Fuzz, Mary Roach takes readers on a wild ride through the incredibly varied field of human wildlife conflict, with stopovers in Reno, Nevada, where a wildlife attack crime scene forensics conference is held, downtown Aspen, Colorado, where breaking and entering bears are a common occurrence, Delhi, India, where Roach herself has a close encounter with one of the many macaques in the city, Vancouver Island, where danger trees live up to their name, the Vatican, where bird scaring is taken incredibly serious.

New Zealand, where the humanness of different rodent traps is considered, and so many other places. Because human wildlife conflict is, of course, found wherever there are humans, and it has existed as long as humans have been around. Over time, our methods of dealing with conflict have changed substantially, as have our attitudes towards the troublesome wildlife. In Fuzz, Roach takes her readers through space and time. exploring a bit of the history of the field of human wildlife conflict and touring the globally diverse mitigation methods and mindsets towards these encounters. On the surface, Fuzz is about the many

creative ways humans have tried to deal with wildlife eating their crops or destroying their property or flying into airplane engines. But underneath the humorous and bizarre stories of bird repellent lasers at the Vatican or choosy bears cruising the fridge in the house they broke into are philosophical musings about what makes a pest a pest, the changing nature of conservation, what peaceful coexistence could look like and whether it could ever be achieved or sustained. Mary Roach is one of my heroes of science communication, and I am so excited to get to chat with her today. So we'll take a quick break here and then get right into the interview. Dinner shows up every night, whether you're prepared for it or not.

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and they come in a bunch of different washes, so I'm about to go order some more. refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash this podcast to get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns, now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash this podcast to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash this podcast. Mary, thank you so, so much for joining me today. I am beyond excited.

Your books are line my shelves. You are one of my favorite writers of all time. You're hilarious. You're incredibly informative. Like, I don't know how you do it, but this is a dream come true, honestly. Oh, stop. I'm blushing. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. I'm super excited to chat with you today about your latest book, Fuzz, when nature breaks the law. So tell me, what is the origin story for this book, if there is one? And when did you first get the idea to write a book about wildlife conflict? Well, it's kind of a roundabout meandering origin story. I, you know, wasn't mauled by a cougar or anything exciting like that. When I finish one book,

I never know what I'm going to do next. I was looking for some new little sliver of science that I've never heard of before. I arrived at human wildlife conflict indirectly. I thought I was maybe going to do something on the forensics, a wildlife forensics, but not the forensic. The forensic of an attack scene, which I do cover in the book, but the forensics of, like when somebody discovers contraband, like it's a pelt or it's like a horn and what is, you know, that sort of forensics. And I got interested in that because I came upon this paper called How to Tell Real versus Counterfeit Tiger Penis. This is like a paper that's used as a handbook for these people who work in the Wildlife Forensics Laboratory up in Ashland, Oregon. There's this woman there and she's

really good and so am I now at identifying real versus counterfeit tiger penis, which is something you need to do because the organ of the tiger is sometimes used to make in traditional medicine as a cure for virility or impotence. This is traditional medicine that doesn't as far as I know have any actual virility properties, but it's something that does get made into a soup. So it's important for her to, for somebody to know when they, like find a box of what appear to be penises, you know, are they from an endangered species or are they not? And it's actually, you'll be happy to know, it is almost always counterfeit.

It's usually deer or horse or cow because, first of all, they're easier to come by. And second of all, they're big. And they're inspiring. And the tiger has a pretty surprisingly small penis. Who know? I feel like it's rude to say that about tigers, but they've got pretty small penises. Anyway, so that led me up to this lab, and I thought, well, this is kind of interesting. Maybe there's a book here.

But as it turns out, I wouldn't be allowed to tag along on an actual investigation. And I wanted to be able to tag along. I like to be there and to be reporting in the moment. And I had this, you know, I was envisioning a sting operation where myself and the officer would be like breaking into this, you know, back alley dimly lit room where people would be bending. over and making, you know, fake tiger penis, which they, they, they, somebody does that because they have to notch them because cats have barbed penis. See, this is not a tidy origin story, Aaron. I love it. I love it. I am so entranced. Anyway, so the whole tagging along with the professionals wasn't going to work for legal reasons, I was told. So I kind of came back home thinking,

it's disappointing, but around that time I came upon a book from 1906 called the criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals. And it's, I wish I thought initially was a hoax because it's, you know, this book about bears being excommunicated from the church and pigs being put on trial, caterpillars being assigned legal representation when they were vandalizing and stealing from farmers. So it was some combination of all of this made me think, oh, what about if we turn it inside out and the animals or the perpetrators, not the victims like this? So that led me to human wildlife conflict. A branch of science I had no idea existed, had never heard of. There are conferences and textbooks and experts and careers. And I was like,

this could be fun. And it certainly is. And it seems like the research for this book took you on incredible adventures all over the world to like Vatican City in search of how to scare birds the best way. Like it's amazing. So, you know, I wanted to ask you what your process was like for deciding, you know, what trips to take and what goes into writing a book? It's pretty straightforward. It is me going, what's going to be most fun for me and for the reader by extension? Like what's going to be surprising, fun, far-flung, exotic, weird, frightening, whatever? What's going to, you know, what, so it's really me almost doing like a scouting for a location in a sense. It's me contacting lots of different people in this world and sort of finding out, you know,

who's going to be out in the field and who will let me come along and be there. So really, if it wasn't fun, funny, surprising, it didn't make the cut. It's also, there's places that appeal to me more than others. I was always curious as a, you know, elapsed Catholic. I was always curious about the Vatican. So I came across some misbehaving gulls in Vatican City, and I thought, let's go see what the Vatican has to say about misbehaving wildlife. And yes, they were having some problems with vandalism. vulls, gulls vandalizing the floral displays at the Easter, this massive floral display at the

Easter Sunday Mass in St. Peter's. So, you know, that's going to be in there. I mean, you know, it wasn't so much the gulls or the crime. In that case, it was just the juxtaposition of wildlife conflict and Vatican City. The Vatican. It's amazing. Yeah, I mean, there were so many amazing places that you went and cool, like, conferences that you tagged along to. And I was wondering if you had one that stuck out in your mind as either the most fun or the most memorable or the weirdest or anything like that in the process of research for this. Well, the one that I think was surprising to me and completely fascinating, I went to this conference on the practice of forensics that attack scenes. In other words, if somebody is mauled by a bear or a cougar, it's usually a

bear or a cougar in this country anyway, the wildlife professionals arrive on the scene and they do things that you would see in a police procedural, like on CSI. You know, there's the yellow tape that's securing the scene. They're going in and they are collecting evidence. They're removing the body so that they can take it to the lab and look at examine the bite marks and the injuries, which tell you a lot about who committed this, quote, unquote, crime. Who did this? You know, so they know everything about how these different animals kill. So it's pretty easy for them to figure out what species it was. Was it a man? Was it a cougar? Was it a wolf? Was it a bear? What kind of bear was it? And then they take it farther and they're trying to figure

out specifically which individual. They may have an animal in custody and they're going to be gathering DNA off of the victim or the victim's clothes and they're going to get a match. And if the suspect, I'm using air quotes, if the suspect is found to be not the actual criminal, again, air quotes, they're released. And I had no idea that anybody does that. So we had this conference where we learned all these techniques. We had fake attack scenes and we had mannequins, these soft touch mannequins that on them, the actual injuries, which were some of them quite gruesome, had been crafted on these bodies so that we had these simulated victims that we then were doing our forensics on, like, you know, looking at the bite marks and, you know, looking at the, you know, is this the hallmark of a cougar versus a bear?

And we're in this big room. And right next to us, there's a large bingo game going on. And the people from the bingo game were sometimes like walk down to the bathrooms and sort of look in. And like, you know, there's these naked, bloodied, full-sized human forms. And they're like, what's going on in the Ponderosa room? So that one, you know, that's just for me, pure gold to write up. It's interesting and it's funny in its way. And so I think that one, I think that one stands out as a lot of fun and just interesting.

Absolutely. I was laughing out loud on the couch while I was reading it. And my partner kept being like, what are you, what are you reading? Like, what's happening over there? I'm like, kept having to read quotes out loud. And I was just like, you've got to just, you got to read this. It's absolutely hilarious, which I feel like that's such a hallmark of your writing. is you are so funny. And I feel like it's a silly question to ask, like, how are you so funny? Why are you so funny? So instead, maybe I'll ask what role you think humor plays in the way you communicate science. Humor, I think humor is just, when it comes to science, sometimes people need a little enticing. You know, I think people wrongly, I believe, but they think that science is dull because they're basing it on, I don't know, their chemistry textbooks.

or whatever it is. So they need a little enticing. And so I think humor is one way to kind of pull people in and kind of entertain them a little bit while they're learning. So it's also more fun for me to write it that way. So much of the humor, though, really has to do with the research. You know, what do I decide to put in the book and what do I decide to leave out? You know, I mean, there's so many different all over the world, so many different human wildlife conflicts and so many different species that people struggle with, so many different solutions. But, you know, I was looking for things that might have some fun, you know, some humor. So humor is important to me.

It's the way that I make the book a fun read, or I hope that I make it a fun read. So we've so far talked a lot about, or a little bit about human wildlife conflict, but I don't know if we've broadly defined what it is. is. And that's sort of, it seems like it could be potentially a tricky question. Because on the outset, you have this concept, okay, well, it's where there's some sort of detrimental outcome when humans and wildlife interact. But who decides what that is? Did you run into this sort of almost a philosophical dilemma in writing this book? Not really because it's typically one of two things. It's either a situation where human beings are being badly harmed or killed, or it's a situation where somebody's bottom line is threatened.

Somebody's financial, so it's largely economical. So if you look at, I mean, the National Wildlife Research Center, which is under the USDA, and the animals that they focus on are ones that damage crops, ones that kill livestock, ones that threaten somebody in agriculture. culture, it's a threat to their bottom line, their economics. So that's typically, you know, where you find animals in the category of nuisance. If you look at the their listing, that's what's there. But then, you know, there's also scenarios where if animals are, like a good case, I think in point is the coyote in this country. The populations have, it seems, if either the populations have gone up. I didn't cover coyotes in the book, but there's, There's been a lot of urban coyotes that are getting close to people in a way that has been perceived as a threat to children.

Because a coyote's not going to go after a full-grown adult, but a small child is around the size of something that a coyote would prey on. And there have been some cases where they're coming closer and or, I think, biting children. And so now that that's happening, there's a lot more focus on coyotes. What do we do about coyotes? You know, when they're just kind of in the background running around, you see, you know, you see them. You're like, whatever, they get into trash sometimes, but they're kind of cool. But now that people feel that their kids are in danger, now that's put them in the crosshairs. One of the things that kept popping out to me is that when there is a particular instance of,

of human wildlife conflict that keeps happening, you know, like a bear keeps getting into trash or something like that. It seems to signal that, okay, something has to change in order to protect both the human and the wildlife. But most of the time, it seems like, and maybe this is my misperception, it seems like it's the animal's behavior that's targeted more than the human's behavior. why is that? Is it just impossible to get a human to change their ways? So, yeah, what do you, why do you think it is more the animal behavior that's targeted? Oh, because humans don't want to bother to change. We don't, you know, we don't, we don't, we don't want to take inconvenience steps. We don't want to, we don't want to change. We would rather just pick up the phone and have

somebody deal with it by and large. And it's ironic because it's so much easier to get a person to change their behavior than an animal. I mean, an animal that is following its instincts, whether it's after food or a warm place to give birth, it's very hard to dissuade that animal. You can't reason with them. You can't find them. You can't read them the riot act. You can try to haze them. but if what they're after is really enticing, like a big dumpster behind a restaurant, you can, you know, you can shoot rubber bullets at them and they'll be like, ow, okay, but I'm still going to go after it. You know, so hazing doesn't work that well.

The things that you can do don't work that well. It's much, much easier, but also still hard to get people to change their behavior, You're either by finding them or educating them or both. So we ought to look, you know, that should just be what's done. It is done more and more. I mean, because over the years, the solutions that have tried to change the behavior of animals or just, you know, kill lots and lots of them have been shown not to work. So people and their behavior is really the place to keep your focus, yeah.

Yeah. It was interesting to read about how relocation is kind of one of the least humane things that you can do sometimes for an animal. And yet so much of it is like there's that balance between keeping the public happy and providing a service that is, you know, valuable and also not angering the public. And, you know, just it seems very challenging to strike that balance. Yes. Yeah. And relocation or translocation is also there's liability issues. If you as a wildlife agency are informed that a bear has been getting close to people's yards, it may have swiped at somebody but not injured them. And you go, you know what? We'll monitor this situation. We're not going to do anything, but we'll monitor it. Now if that bear comes in again and, in fact, harms somebody in a serious way or kills them, You as the agency who didn't take action can be liable. Similarly, if you do take action and you relocate that bear, and now it goes to the community closest to that forest where you've relocated it, and it gets into the same kind of behavior and somebody's harmed there, again, you would be liable. And there have been pretty big lawsuits with pretty big payouts. So that is also a factor, yeah.

So, yeah, there's no easy answer. unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. Some of these human wildlife conflicts that you describe in your book seem almost Disney-like, right? You know, a bear breaking into a house and delicately sifting through the fridge and putting some things aside and only choosing certain items. And then others are very much less so, like some of these quote-unquote man-eating cats. what makes a cat man-eating and how is this term maybe not the best to describe a cat?

Yeah, the term man-eating or man-eater was coined by one of those big game hunters, Jim Corbett, who wrote a lot of books about his adventures tracking and killing these creatures. I should say this is said in India in a particular region of India where leopards sometimes do. attack humans in the Middle Himalaya. Elsewhere in India, it's rare that somebody's killed by a leopard, but up there, these attacks do happen. It's a misnomer. To call it a man-eater because, in reality, at least in the scenario that I reported on up there while I was working on the book, it's almost entirely children and women because they're out working in the fields. They're out with the livestock and they are the ones, and also old people. But, you know,

it's easier prey. So men, big strapping men, like Jim Corbett, are not going to get attacked. So man-eater is kind of a – also, it's a bit of a – like this was a career choice of the leopard. Like, you know what? I'm going to be a man-eater. Fine, none of these deer, the hell of that. I'm going for the men. And it's really – it's a situation where I was, at least, where a lot of people have out-migrated to cities.

And so a lot of villages are very sparsely populated. So the people who are left who are working the fields and tending livestock, they're few and far between. They tend to be on their own. Also, the brush has grown in around these fields, and leopards need to conceal themselves until they get pretty close, and then they sprint up an attack. So this outmigration has created a scenario that's easier for leopards to prey on something different. And there's also the prey that they normally feed on because of deforestation is dwindling. So they're kind of forced to find other things to eat. And that happens in California,

if you have a situation where a cougar is injured or sickly, it starts coming into a human community. Normally you wouldn't see a cougar coming in that close to a human settlement, except on your doorbell camera late at night. So it's usually something, something's gone wrong. It's not just a personality quirk like, I'm going to be a man eater. I like how that sounds. So as a result of your global travels for this book, you got to see a huge variation in the way that human wildlife conflict is handled. And, you know, I was curious to know what you thought about how much the strategy depends on either the region or the animals that are most commonly involved in the conflict.

And who decides between coexistence and, you know, this town ain't big enough for the both of us. How much does that vary based on these different factors? I think it's very much a red state, blue state situation. in this country. You can't generalize for the United States. There are states where the Department of Natural Resources, I'm thinking of, I think it was Michigan, they don't have a, they're basically,

you got a gun on your property, and you've got a bear that's bugging you, it's up to you, just you take care of it. There's that. And then you have California where a ballot measure was put forth to put cougars back on mountain lines, back on the endangered list, even though in some counties, they are doing fine. In other counties they're not, it shouldn't be statewide. It should be sort of county by county because there's a lot of

difference. So it's very much cultural in states where people are raised in a hunting culture. They're more likely to support killing the animals. Our history is tame the wilderness, go west, make it your own, do what you have to do. And wildlife, wild animals, big mammals in particular, were viewed as either competition. They were, you know, they were taking deer that people wanted to hunt, or they were taking livestock, or they were just varmints. They were, you know, better off dead. So that's kind of our history in India, though Hinduism has a number of gods that represent are representing. as animals, and two of those are big nuisance animals, monkeys and elephants. But because of the

Wildlife Protection Act and because people have kind of a reverence and a fondness for animals because of this association, they're much more conservative and they don't like, they don't even like attempts to come up with birth control for monkeys. They don't want anybody messing. They want the problem fixed. They don't want these animals, you know, coming into their apartments and trashing things and throwing things around and they don't want that. They want them to go away, but they don't want them messed with in any way. And it's very difficult for the people in the government to deal with that, to figure out something that will seem humane, but also solve the problem. So it's very culture-specific. And I think that is what determines what

happens. In this country, it's state-by-state. And I imagine in India as well, and that's true. anywhere you go in the world. People have culture-specific feelings about animals. Yeah. Have you ever been personally involved in a human wildlife conflict interaction? I was mugged by a macaque in India, but I had it coming because I went up to this. There's a fort up on the hill outside this small city where I was. Bundy and everybody was talking about, oh, don't go up there. There's a lot of monkeys. A lot of monkeys. Be

careful. Carry a stick if you go. And I'm like, oh, I want to see what that's like to get mugged by monkey. So I didn't, I walked up there with a shopping bag full of bananas. So I was definitely asking for it. And it was very interesting. It was not scary. It was just over so fast. And I was impressive because there were two of them. You know, one of them kind of popped up from behind a rock and stepped in my path and I'm focused on that monkey. And this other one dashes out from behind me and grabs the bag. And I was like, slick, you guys. I'm not even mad. I'm impressed. That's amazing. Okay, we are going to take a quick break here, but stick around because we've got so much more to chat about in the world of human wildlife conflict. Anyone who works long hours

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Santana and Doobie Brothers won this tour, 2026. Welcome back, everyone. Let's just jump right back in. So, Mary, the world of human wildlife conflict is filled with some of the most varied and unusual jobs. What are some of the ways that you could get into the human wildlife conflict biz? And what would you want to do? Oh, yeah, there's a lot of them. I mean, the most obvious one is working for a wildlife agency in every state in this country has,

it's either fish in wildlife or fish and game, or they all have their own sort of take on that. But those are the people who are called in when there are issues. And that is, that's a tough one, though, because if you're interested in this career because you love animals, you love wild animals, you love the outdoors, it has definite perks. but on the other hand, when an animal has crossed the line in the eyes of the agency, it's you who has to kill the animal. And I've talked with people who have to do that. And it's so hard and they feel horrible about it.

It's an awful thing to have to do. Plus, they get a lot of hate mail and threats from people who don't feel that that animal should have been killed. So that's a tough one. But there's other ways to be involved in it. There are people who have founded nonprofits that promote coexistence. For example, the wolf situation is quite a contentious one in certain parts of this country. There are folks who try to bring together people on both sides of the divide, the people who are speaking for the wolves and don't want the wolves harmed,

and then the people ranchers often who are not only suffering economic fallout from wolves eating livestock, but also it's just, you know, it is an emotional thing. You've got, you know, your life is sheep or whatever goats and they keep getting killed. So, so bringing those people together to have a conversation and try to not just talk, but listen and try to understand where the other person is coming from. And there are people, this is again, not a job I want, but there are people are really good at moderating, who are good at facilitating conversations. between people with very different viewpoints and trying to come to some kind of compromise and some compromise-based solutions that everybody could be happy with.

So there's a number of those groups out there that do really good work. What else? You could be somebody who tries to design effective deterrence, like the person who was working in India on, using something you would use for early earthquake detection, using that to know when elephants are coming your way toward your village, about to raid your crops. So because, you know, you want to herd them off before they get there and people who are, you know, you don't want people sort of running out trying to scare off 17 elephants because that doesn't go well for the people.

So, I mean, which I thought that was creative. You could, you know, there's this creativity and engineering that can be applied to it. I think if I had to do anything, I would want to be one of those people who, even though it's kind of grisly, the attack forensics, the person who shows up on the scene, you know, like puts up the yellow tape

and collects the evidence and does that work? I think that sounds most interesting to me. Yeah, the field of human wildlife conflict is massive. And I think, you know, you brought up one of the, really interesting ones, which is this development of creative deterrent or elimination strategies for

certain wildlife. And I was curious if you had one in mind that you thought was the most interesting or the most creative that you came across when you were writing this book. You know what was most interesting to me is that the classic scarecrow, not only does it not work because the birds quickly figure out and they call your bluff, like, nah, that thing's not moving. But beyond that, birds start to, apparently, some birds, see a scarecrow and it's kind of like, you know, Bob's big boy sign. It's like a, hello, food here. Pull over here while you're migrating for a tasty treat. So in fact, it kind of has the opposite effect. It's like a signpost that there's lots of good food right here. I did like, I learned a lot about effigies, which are bizarre.

Like if you, it works pretty, it works very well with vultures, certain birds, a little bit with roosting gulls if you're trying to clear a place where they're all hanging out. And effigy is a, if you were to take a dead version of that bird, hang it by its feet. I mean, again, not a lovely thing, but it just sort of, hang. it there by its feet with the wings spread out, no other birds of that species are going to come anywhere near for

quite a while. Nothing is permanent, but it was, I forget how long it was, months and months that vultures were kept away when this was done. And they was figured out accidentally. We don't have to go into the story, but you can now

purchase effigies, or you can just buy a styrofoam body and stick the wing, because the feathers seem to be important in the tail and the wings. But you can buy a body because the body's, you know, rot quickly with all the viscerous so you can, you know, fashion your own and hang it up there. It's effective, but the thing is it creeps people out. They had a down in the Everglades.

There's this place where people pull up their, you know, with their boats and launch their boats. And in the parking lot, there were a lot of vultures ripping up people's windshield wiper blades or the cocking around the sunroof. This is something vultures do. We go into that in the book. We don't have to kind of do that now. But they do this and it's annoying for people. So the park people hung up some effigies and it was effective. But then they spent all day talking to people about why there are these creepy dead birds strung up in the parking lot. Somebody strung up a dead vulture in the parking lot. What's going on? And then they'd have to explain the whole thing. So

eventually they just put a bunch of tarps out and said, hey, vultures attack your cars, put a tarp over it, which works very well. Yeah, I think it's interesting that in what may be the best solution in the lab may not be the best solution when actually tested in real life. Yeah, sometimes it's just better to go with a simple solution. Put a freaking tarp on your car. Yeah. It seems like a lot of the animals that are involved in these conflicts.

Some of them are charismatic, like bears and cougars, I think, and elephants are quite, you know, lovely and wonderful. And then others kind of are, you know, get a bad rap, like vultures and goals. How much do you think that plays a role into the solutions we end up going with or the way that we handle these. conflicts. Oh, huge role. Just by calling an animal a pest, whether it's a species of bird or a rodent or bats getting into your attic, you call it a pest or a nuisance. You know, you categorize it that way and it gives people permission to just think of it, not as an animal, but as something to be dealt with. Just call in an expert and make it go away. So that is a huge part of it.

And also, the rat is not as charismatic. It's not, I mean, the charismatic animals are typically cute, typically big. Rodents and a lot of people don't like birds. I'm a bird lover, but my friend Ann's like, I hate birds. Like, wait a minute, all birds? I don't know, she thinks they're dirty or what it is. She's like, I hate birds. So, yeah, that term passed, I don't like it.

Because it just people don't have to really think about it. They can just call up somebody to set a trap or put poison out. They can very easily just have somebody deal with it. But it's not an it. I mean, it's an it, I guess. But it's an animal, like a cougar, you know, like an elephant. It's just smaller and maybe more annoying to you at the moment. Yeah, I loved the part in your book when you talked about how this hilarious irony of how there are so many bird, quote unquote, pest control that goes into sunflower farming when the sunflowers are there to make bird sea.

And it's just like, what? How is this happening? Yeah. Yeah, you're like, well, because the sunflower farmers, there are a lot of them in North and South Dakota, right in the migration path of literally millions, tens of millions of blackbirds and crows and cowbirds. And they are all passing through. And they're like, hey, huge feel of birdsie down there. Let's go.

Like, I guess, you know, that wasn't a consideration when they were planning what to plant there. but, you know, and it's been a disaster for the industry and for the birds. And the smart farmers decided to grow something else because it's very, it's a, yeah, well, we don't have to get into the trials and tribulations of birdseed farmers. And by the way, actually, the main thing they do with sunflower seeds is make oil. It's a small percentage of sunflower seeds that go into bird seed. But nonetheless, the irony is rich. It's quite rich, yeah.

We talked about how a lot of animals are more valued than others in terms, or maybe viewed more or less as pests. Do you think that this has changed a lot over in the U.S., I'll say specifically, in the 20th into the 21st centuries, and is that sort of shaped the way that we have handled some of these conflicts? Oh, yeah, it's changed a great deal. I mean, if you look back to the 1800s and early 1900s, there were bounties on cougars, bears, coyotes, whatever, not just the big ones, but there were anything that was proving vexatious to farmers or communities or ranchers. They were bounties, and people were encouraged. The government encouraged people to poison, to shoot, to do all of that.

You know, fast forward to the 1960s and the don't. of the conservation, you know, the environmental movement and also animal welfare groups, that has changed the perspective and that has made a huge, huge difference to the point where these populations have recovered enough that now they're starting to really get up in people's business again. So it's kind of, you know, there's been this embracing of wildlife and protecting wildlife and encouraging wildlife. And now that the populations have recovered and also, you know, we are expanding into their territory.

So it's all combining to kind of erode people's patience and keenness to have these animals around. So it's almost because of the scale of the change from back then till now that we are starting to see more conflict. It's interesting to think about how what we envision as the ideal ecosystem or the ideal number or amount of this animal versus this animal and how that, like, is there anything actually ideal or what is the disconnect between what we imagine as ideal and then when we actually live in that quote unquote ideal space, how it is not so great for anyone involved. Right. Yeah, that's a tough one to figure out. Because invasive species, they are everywhere. And how far do you let them go in situations? The one that I talk about in the book quite a bit is New Zealand, because New Zealand, it's an island with a unique set of flora and fauna, fauna in particular we're talking about. They've got flightless birds. and also a lot of reptiles, but it's the flightless birds

that are particularly vulnerable to these animals, stotes and weasels and ferrets, feral cats, these creatures that are all invasive, the country has sort of, as a nation, agreed to eliminate stotes, rats, and possums. Because if they don't,

they're heading into a situation where they aren't going to have any unique animals and birds left. But it's kind of heartbreaking because they themselves, going back to the early 1900s, they themselves imported these creatures, the stoats and the, they imported the stoats to kill the rabbits that they'd earlier imported that populated the landscape far further than they wanted them to. So they brought in the stoats.

The stoats got there, looked around and said, yeah, there's some rabbits. But you know what? These flightless birds are much more appealing and so easy to get. So they were decimated these bird species, also reptiles. But that's a lot of animals to wipe out. It's called Predator Free New Zealand 2050 there. The hope is to wipe out Stoats, Rats, and Possums by 2050. And not everybody's on board with that.

And you can, like you were mentioning, you know, you're bringing it back to a point in time. But things have already changed from there. I mean, anyway, yeah, how do you freeze time? I mean, these things are always evolving. But that said, it's a, you know, I could certainly understand how if you lived in New Zealand, you wouldn't want to lose all of those birds and reptiles that are going extinct. So, yeah, how it's an invasive species. That's a tough one. Whole books are written on that one. Yeah, yeah. We've covered at least one on the podcast before, well, more in the context of rabbits and mixomatosis and the way they, you know, dealt with that in Australia.

But I really feel like often this piling on of adding another animal to control this animal that was introduced and then this animal and this animal, I think it just goes to, show how not great we have been historically and maybe still are today not the best at predicting animal behavior or what animals will do. Right. And also having a thorough enough understanding of the whole ecosystem, you know, when you're going to remove one piece of the chain, are you sure you've looked at all the side effects of that, all the repercussions? Are you sure? because it seems like in the past often it's those unknown unknowns. And, you know, like there's the example of the mongooses, monguese were brought into, I don't know which one is.

Your guess is as good as mine. Into the, who was it the sugar cane fields in Hawaii to control rats, I think it was? But one species is nocturnal and one's diurnal, so never the twain met. And that seems like maybe somebody should have thought of that in the beginning. And again, I didn't report on that. So I may be oversimplifying how that all unfolded. But it didn't go well. Let's just say that.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it all seems so glaringly obvious, you know, in retrospect. So, you know, speaking of past attempts at controlling or mitigating human wildlife. conflict. How do you feel about the future of it? Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic? I'm actually optimistic, partly because I see how far we have progressed from the 1800s and early 1900s. I do feel like that is the trend over the long haul, that people, more and more people have a, they value wildlife because it's wildlife for its own sake, not for, you know, what

can I use it for or how is it bugging me, but just, wow, how lucky are we to have these incredibly beautiful things on the planet with us? So, and again, of course, there's, you know, there's, that is not a universal opinion here in the U.S. But, but we have come a long way. And I, feel that if you look at some of the organizations that are charged with monitoring this and making the rules and deciding what happens, the National Wildlife Research Center and the USDA, who runs that center, have been of late hiring non-lethal experts, not people, not just to kind of pay lip service to, oh, you know, if you were to build a pen for your chickens, a nighttime, a safe, well-made nighttime enclosure, they won't get nabbed.

Or if you were to trim this brushback or change the way you graze these sheep, I think it would help a lot. So they're hiring these people, and that's come out of some dialogues between the National Wildlife Research Center slash USDA and the NRDC Natural Resources Defense Committee, is it, or council. So there's been, again, those sort of coexistence meetings, people from kind of agencies that usually clash who are now sitting down and trying to work together. And I see that as a hugely positive development. Maybe I'm Pollyanna-ish.

But I think, I mean, that's the best development, the most hopeful development I've seen. And, you know, I forget the number of states and the amount of money. budgeted, but it seemed significant and it seemed that the mindset within the agency, that is the USDA, is shifting a bit. You know, some of the newer hires and the younger people are less inclined to carry on the tradition of shoot trap and poison. I hope so anyway. What a dream come true. Seriously, unbelievable. Thank you so, so much, Mary, for taking the time to chat. I had an absolute blast. Whoever said, don't meet your heroes was very wrong. And I think that someone needs to use what's going on in the

Ponderosa room as the title of like their next murder mystery or something because it's just too good. If you all enjoyed this as much as I did and want to learn more, check out our website, This Podcast Will Kill You.com where I'll post a link to where you can find Fuzz when nature breaks the law as well as Mary's other books. And don't forget, you can check out our website for all sorts of other cool things, including, but not limited, to transcripts, quarantini and plesiberita recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate account, our Goodreads list, a firsthand account form, and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our

episodes. Thank you to Liana Squalachi for our audio mixing. And thanks to you, listeners, for listening. I hope you liked this bonus episode and are loving being part of the TPWKY Book Club. A special thank you, as always, to our fantastic patrons. We appreciate your support so very much. Well, until next time, keep washing those hands. This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankel. Listen, I have a bone to pick with these dog food brands calling themselves fresh, natural, healthy. Sounds great, but a lot of these, quote,

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